1Jakub's World

Jakub’s1 World Five-year-old Jakub Szabmacher sits on the floor in the center of the front row of a group of children posing for a photograph. He wears a Little Lord Fauntleroy velvet suit and lace collar and he looks very sulky. Jakub’s sulkiness is not unusual. He’s known to his family as a “little devil,” a “rascal,” a “scamp.” He always wants his own way and when he doesn’t get it, he throws tantrums—never in front of his father, even though his mother’s long thin hands are the ones that really hurt when he’s slapped. He’s given to willful excess. He stands in the pouring rain outside his aunt’s house for half an hour because his mother has refused to buy him what he wants. His mother ignores him but his big sister, Dewora, gets soaked trying to coax him back inside. His pride won’t let him give in to her too quickly, but he’s gratified to see how much she cares. When his mother takes him with her to visit Mala Kirszt, the midwife who brought him into the world and who is now dying of cancer, he keeps up an even whine: “I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home,” and then when his mother, Bluma, doesn’t respond, he pokes his finger into an electric light socket—electricity is a luxury in his town—and gets stuck to the lamp. He nearly electrocutes himself. When he’s old enough to know better, he whines and sulks because his mother tells him that she cannot afford to buy him the tin of shoe polish he wants. She knows he’s picky about his appearance. Hasn’t she marvelled that in 1 © 2005 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 Jakub’s World spring when the unpaved streets of his village turn to ankle- deep mud his boots stay clean? He beats up bigger boys. Their mothers come to his house to complain. They glance at the skinny little fellow and say his stocky older brother Hiluß has been out there slugging their sons. He’ll probably grow up to be a bandit, his family sighs. He hates his home town Bel-ªyce. Hates the unpaved streets, the boring, gossipy people. When he’s big enough, he’s going to leave. Go to his father’s hometown Warsaw, perhaps, like his brother Hiluß and his sister Dewora. His earliest memory is of his father taking him there when he was three and he still remembers the names of the streets: Chl-odna, Nowolipki. His father brings chocolate tortes filled with mocha cream and pale plywood boxes filled with golden smoked sardines back with him from Warsaw—you can’t buy food like that in Bel-ªyce! Or to Kazimierz, his mother’s family home where her sister, his aunt, has a bakery and where he spends his vaca- tions. Kazimierz has paved streets, a cobbled market square, beautiful baroque houses—on one of them there’s a bas relief of St. Christopher with the Christ child on his shoul- der—and the best ice cream in the world. People from all over Poland vacation in Kazimierz, visit the wooden syna- gogue to see the Esterka’s crown, which King Kazimierz Wielki gave to his beautiful Jewish mistress, Esterka. Kazimierz Dolny, on the Vistula River, is “czyste jak pudelko,” clean as a box, he hears people say. In Kazimierz, he swims in the broad and winding Vistula river, climbs steep grassy slopes to the white castle which looks down on the town. He takes walks with his mother along a road that leads up a hill and they drink in the scent of acacias each spring and he piles up glossy horse chestnuts there in the fall. Yes, Kazimierz, perhaps. Or . “Jakub has told us, ‘When I am eighteen years old, I’m going to Palestine,’” his father, Chaim, writes to his sister who is living there. In the meantime, he has to live in Bel-ªyce, small, drab Bel-ªyce—even the bus he takes to Kazimierz doesn’t bother © 2005 State University of New York Press, Albany Jakub’s World 3 to exhibit its name—where there’s a mill and a forge, a few small shops and businesses catering to the surrounding farms and the town, and a bar where men drink, and where Jakub knows everyone, at least by sight. Mr. Goldstein has a long beard, wears a hat. He trains the little orthodox boys of Bel-ªyce in the Torah, the alphabet. Jakub goes to the Tarbut school, he doesn’t attend the Cheder, but he looks up to Mr. Goldstein. Mr. Goldstein’s a teacher, and Jakub knows that a teacher must have his respect. The old lady in black he often sees in the square lifts her skirts, spreads her legs, and pisses in the street. One of the neighbors has a peg leg and hangs a piece of burlap out on the line to dry every day. It is com- mon knowledge to Jakub and his friends that this grown-up wets his bed! Mrs. Chómicka is his mother’s friend. Nojech Feld, the watchmaker, is a communist. Srulke Kirszt, the barber who pulls teeth as well as shaves chins, stands outside on his verandah when he’s drunk and bellows out arias. Blacksmith Skrajinski’s grown-up son, Mietek, is bulky and strong. He got that way, Jakub’s mother has told him, from eating up all his scrambled eggs, and his mother should know, they rented rooms in the Skrajinski’s house when Hiluß was a baby and they had more money. Most of Bel-ªyce, Jakub finds, is primitive, small minded, un-nice. He lives at 9 Ulica Krótka, Short Street, at the edge of the center of town. The neighborhood is mixed: Jews and non-Jews live harmoniously together. The family occupies one large room of a small wooden house with carved corner posts, an open front porch with a little peak-roofed attic above it, and an outhouse at the back. There is a well across the street by the forge and they wash in the cold water from that well even in winter. It helps to keep him healthy, his mother says. A large bed stands against one wall in their room and opposite it an armoire, a pot bellied stove, and a wooden linen chest. When relatives come to stay, they set a board and a mattress on four chairs for them to sleep on. A lilac tree grows right outside their front window and when they open it lilacs pour in. In spring, he stands by the window carefully picking through the sprays for three- and © 2005 State University of New York Press, Albany 4 Jakub’s World five-petalled flowers, then sucks the drop of sap at their base. Jakub likes that tree, its taste and its smell, and he likes the sour cherry tree that stands to the right of the house and whose branches he climbs to pick the delicious tart fruit; the raspberries, currants, and gooseberries that grow at the side; the wild blueberries he picks in the woods; and the fresh yellow tomatoes farmers give him when he goes to nearby villages, hamlets, and farms with his father’s relatives the Kirszts, who fit glass into windows. When he’s very young, he sits on his great-grandfather’s lap and sucks sugar cubes that the 102-year-old man dunks in vodka for him. When he’s bigger, he chases hoops; plays Pietnasćie Kroków (I reached you in fifteen paces—you’re out!); collects big black beetles after it has rained from the ground by a shed in the market square, traps them in match- boxes, holds them to his ear and listens to them scratch; gouges birch twigs into whistles; makes skates in the winter by taking a triangular piece of wood, heating up a wire and burning it into the edges of the wood, then nailing straps onto the wide part. Most of the time they don’t work too well but it keeps him busy and it’s fun. He plays cards with Uszer Weisbrot, Moiszele Friedman, and Herszel Zancberg, the fuel merchant’s son. They are older than he is, but he always wins. Jakub is afraid of the dead. When someone in his neighborhood has died, he imagines the corpse will reach out and grab him, so he runs past that house as fast as he can, holding his breath. He can’t wait to grow up and do the things his older brother does—go to school, wear long trousers, play chess with his father. His father is a middle man supplying goods to local shops, he goes away frequently to Warsaw and when he comes back Jakub meets him at the bus stop and kisses his hand. None of the other children greet their fathers like that! None of his friends call their parents Tatunia, Mamunia, or address them politely using the formal third person. Jakub notices that Chaim reads Der Hajnt, a Zionist daily, that Bluma subscribes to a Polish language Jewish © 2005 State University of New York Press, Albany Jakub’s World 5 weekly,Opinja, that Opinja comes from Warsaw. Jakub is too little to know that the same cooperative publishes both, that they are both Zionist publications loyal to the Polish govern- ment, openly patriotic even, that Opinja is written in Polish because its editors wish “to raise a curtain and reveal to the Polish community, with whom we share the same piece of earth, a mirror in which it can see a faithful image of the Jewish community,” and that “its chief aim is to acquaint the Jewish inteligentsia which reads Polish with the broad field of Jewish knowledge, with the deeds of the Jewish nation, with the pearls of Hebrew and Yiddish literary creation.” He’s proud of his father.

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